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Weekend links 45

That essential journal of esoteric culture, Strange Attractor, announced a fourth number this week sporting a psychedelic cover which may be the work of Julian House (no credit is given on the SA site). As to the contents:

From Haiti and Hong Kong to the fourth dimension and beyond: discover the secrets of madness in animals; voodoo soul and dub music; ancient peacock deities; Chinese poisoning cults; the history of spider silk weaving; heathen mugwort magic; sentient lightning; Jesuit conspiracy theories; junkie explorers; Dali’s Atlantis; the resurgence of Pan (in London’s Crouch End); anarchist pirates on Madagascar; an ancient Greek Rip Van Winkle; French anatomical waxworks; Arthur Machen’s forgotten tales and Alan Moore’s unpublished John Dee opera.

Further details and the means to order a copy can be found here.

• Resonance FM’s Weird Tales For Winter has returned beginning with a presentation of The Gateway of the Monster, one of the better Carnaki tales by William Hope Hodgson. The story is read by Moon Wiring Club‘s Ian Hodgson (no relation) and the musical atmospheres are provided by The Advisory Circle. I ought to have posted this news yesterday since you’ll have missed the broadcasting of the first half but the second half will go out at midnight (UK time) on Monday. Details here, and the next release on the Café Kaput label in February will be the soundtrack, Music for Thomas Carnaki (Radiophonic Themes & Abstracts).

• The Keep Calm and Carry On Image Generator lets you work your own variations on the ubiquitous poster. It wouldn’t work for me, however, so I rolled up my sleeves and made my own. This may be good as a CafePress design, yes?

• Interplay is an album by John Foxx and The Maths due to be released on March 21st. As with last year’s collection of Foxx instrumental pieces, DNA, the package design is by Jonathan Barnbrook. John Foxx first came to prominence as the lead singer in Ultravox (do I need to say “of course”? Okay…“of course”) and Ultravox’s debut album was part-produced by Brian Eno. It’s been painfully obvious recently (and it pains me to say it) that Foxx’s DNA was a far more accomplished and engaging work than Eno’s recent collection of over-hyped instrumentals. Related: Barnbrook Design’s albums of 2010.

• Word Horde 2.0, “a substantial archive of manuscript material, correspondence, and books and printed matter, mostly signed” from the William Burroughs archives can be yours for $260,000. Related: William Burroughs’ Wild Boys photos. Also: Rudy Rucker on David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.

• “Nabokov described how ‘a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine with the purpose of exploring the Cenozoic era’ would encounter the following series of events in the evolution of these butterflies…” The Royal Society confirms that a contentious theory of Vladimir Nabokov’s concerning the descent of butterfly populations was accurate.

• The work of Gérald Bertot aka Thomas Owen, a Belgian author of weird fiction, is explored at A Journey Round My Skull.

• The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles’ unfinished film from 1972, may finally be given a release.

• Jon Savage celebrates Roy Harper and his extraordinary Stormcock album.

• Philip Pullman wants the Tory philistines to leave our libraries alone.

• Rick Poynor takes a dérive through the arcades of Paris.

• Space music new and old.

• Young Savage (1977) by Ultravox | Clicktrack (2010) by John Foxx & Jonathan Barnbrook.

Weekend links 44

Poster by Will Bradley for Victor Bicycles (c. 1895).

• G. Wayne Clough, chief exective of the Smithsonian Institution, finally admits that he made a hasty decision in removing David Wojnarowicz’s video from the Hide/Seek exhibition of gay art. Related: “Finland’s cultural gifts to the world include Sibelius, the Moomins and an artist that the country has been less eager to celebrate.” The belated homecoming of Tom of Finland.

• The Fiend with Twenty Faces: Jonathan Clements examines the legacy of Edogawa Rampo (Hirai Taro), the Japanese master of mystery and imagination.

• RIP Susannah York. The Guardian posted a selection of clips including one from Robert Altman’s Images (1972).

• More mixtapes: Trish Keenan’s Mind Bending Motorway Mix and a selection for Quietus by Chris & Cosey.

• “Ruin photos speak to our desperate desire to have our world re-enchanted.”

Promo poster by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat for My White Bicycle by Tomorrow (1967).

• The Raging Peloton: Iain Sinclair on two wheels good, four wheels bad.

• The unknown Jorge Luis Borges: five new anthologies reviewed.

• The French house untouched for 100 years (and also here).

• Electrotypes on Drugs: old chemists’ labels.

• South China Sea Pishkun by Dinh Q. Lê.

• Bike (1967) by Pink Floyd | My White Bicycle (1967) by Tomorrow | Trip On An Orange Bicycle (1968) by Orange Bicycle.

Echoes of Aubrey

More of Aubrey Beardsley’s posthumous influence and more of the delightful collision between the 1890s and the 1960s. Monsieur Thombeau turned up this striking fashion shoot from LIFE magazine for 1967 showing a model posed against one of the Salomé drawings. A couple of days after this was posted, a reader wrote to point me to this list of films featuring Beardsley artwork. Most of those I knew about already but I certainly hadn’t heard of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), a low-budget horror film about which we’re told:

A large, black, four-poster bed, possessed by a demon, is passed from owner to owner. The demon was a tree, who became a breeze and seemingly fell in love with a woman he blew past. The demon then took human form and conjured up a bed. While he was making love with the woman she died and his eyes bled onto the bed, causing it to become possessed. Those who come into contact with the bed are frequently consumed by it (victims are pulled into what is apparently a large chamber of digestive fluids beneath the sheets). The bed demonstrates a malevolent intelligence as well as some psychokinetic and limited telepathic abilities to manipulate dreams. A running commentary or chorus is supplied by the ghost—if that is the correct word—of an artist (who would appear to be Aubrey Beardsley, though this is never stated directly) trapped behind a painting on the wall.

That’s a posthumous fame Aubrey never would have anticipated. If anyone has seen this, let us know what you thought.

Carry On Loving (1970).

Absent from the list of films is Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance, which features the Salomé pictures again in its title sequence, and Carry On Loving, one of the dreadful British sex comedies which has an entire scene set in a modish pad decorated with Beardsley prints. Watch the scene in question here, if you must.

The prints were produced by a London company, Gallery Five, in the late 60s, and their ad shows they were also selling works by Kay Nielsen (seen in the Carry On clip), John Austen, Charles Ricketts, George Barbier, Jessie King and others. Gallery Five did much to popularise Beardsley’s art among people who might otherwise have never noticed his work, and their products turn up in many films and TV dramas of the period. Finally—although it’s by no means the last word on this subject—the V&A has two great Beardsley-derived ads for Elliott Boots by Paul Christodoulou here and here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive

Weekend links: New Year edition

Flower Me Gently (2010) by Linn Olofsdotter.

• “Many of Moorcock’s editorials are published here, and they still make exhilarating reading. Then, as now, Moorcock set his face against a besetting English sin: a snobbish parochial weariness, an ironic superiority to the frightful oiks who have started filling up the streets. You can almost hear, behind the languorous flutter of the pages, Sir Whatsits sniggering to Lady Doo-Dah. It still goes on, and it’s usually the same flummery in different clothes. Moorcock not only would not go to the party: he threw the literary equivalent of explosive devices into the Hampstead living rooms.” Michael Moorcock’s Into the Media Web reviewed. And also here.

• “Beefheart channeled a secret history of America, the underbelly of a continent and a culture that has now all but vanished along with one of its greatest poets.” Jon Savage on the life and work of the late Captain.

• Miniatures Blog, in which musician Morgan Fisher works his way through each of the fifty one-minute tracks on his extraordinary Miniatures compilation album, with details and anecdotes about the artists and the recording of each piece.

• Look at Life: IN gear (1967). A Rank Organisation newsreel about Swinging London. Sardonic commentary and some great colour photography showing how the often shabby reality differs from the caricature. Many of the shots are familiar from documentaries about the era but this is the first time I’ve seen them all in one place.

Predator (Self-portrait) by Linn Olofsdotter.

• Lewis Carroll’s new story: The Guardian‘s review of Through the Looking-Glass from December, 1871. Related: My Through the Psychedelic Looking-Glass 2011 calendar is now reduced in price.

• The United Kingdom and Ireland as seen from the International Space Station, December, 2010. Related: Spacelog, the stories of early space exploration from the original NASA transcripts.

• The “Big Basket” Fraud, 1958: “…there seems to be a limited segment with a one-track mind interested in seeing an exaggerated masculine appendage.”

• “Ancient arena of discord”: a billboard for King’s Cross by Jonathan Barnbrook. Related: Vale Royal by Aidan Andrew Dun.

• The inevitable Ghost Box link, Jim Jupp is interviewed at Cardboard Cutout Sundown.

• Amazon is still playing the random moral guardian at the Kindle store.

• Antwerpian Expressionists at A Journey Round My Skull.

• Salami CD and vacuum packaging by Mother Eleganza.

• Paris 1900: L’Architecture Art Nouveau à Paris.

• Bill Sienkiewicz speaks about Big Numbers #3.

• Philippe Druillet illustrates Dracula, 1968.

• Aesthetic Peacocks at the V&A.

• Well Did You Evah! (1990), Deborah Harry & Iggy Pop directed by Alex Cox.

“Who is this who is coming?”

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968).

He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles round. It was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many scents possess) of forming pictures in the brain. He saw quite clearly for a moment a vision of a wide, dark expanse at night, with a fresh wind blowing, and in the midst a lonely figure—how employed, he could not tell. Perhaps he would have seen more had not the picture been broken by the sudden surge of a gust of wind against his casement, so sudden that it made him look up, just in time to see the white glint of a sea-bird’s wing somewhere outside the dark panes.

MR James, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.

One of the alleged highlights of this year’s Christmas television from the BBC was a new adaptation of an MR James ghost story, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. The film starred John Hurt and came with the same truncated title, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, as was used for Jonathan Miller’s 1968 version, also a BBC production. The story title comes originally from a poem by Robert Burns. The new work was adapted by Neil Cross and directed by Andy de Emmony, and I describe it as an alleged highlight since I wasn’t impressed at all by the drama, the most recent attempt by the BBC to continue a generally creditable tradition of screening ghost stories at Christmas. Before I deal with my disgruntlement I’ll take the opportunity to point the way to some earlier derivations. (And if you don’t want the story spoiled, away and read it first.)

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